grasslands

Some 1.9 million acres of grasslands in the Great Plains were converted to cropland in 2022, said the World Wildlife Fund on Thursday in its annual Plowprint report. “While this figure’s significance cannot be downplayed, it marks an improvement from the previous 10-year average of 2.6 million acres annually,” said the group.

An ever-larger share of land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve will be devoted to grasslands — nearly 4 of every 10 acres — with the results of this year's signup for the long-term land stewardship program, said the Agriculture Department on Monday. With the new enrollments, the Conservation Reserve is near the 27-million-acre limit set by the 2018 farm law.

Congress has a once-in-a-generation opportunity in the new farm bill to remodel the land-idling Conservation Reserve to focus on small tracts that merit attention and to encourage carbon capture on grasslands, said a farm policy expert on Monday. The reserve was created in 1985 to retire entire fields or even farms of fragile land from crop production, but those "general" enrollments have fallen steeply since 2007.

The USDA will accept more than 1 million acres of the land that was offered for entry into the land-idling Conservation Reserve during the recent signup for large tracts of land, said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on Monday. Contracts expire on 2 million acres of land in the reserve this fall and enrollment of 23 million acres is well below the ceiling of 27 million acres.

The Agriculture Department said it would enroll more than 3.1 million acres of grasslands — the largest amount ever — in the Conservation Reserve Program this fall, underlining the transformation of the reserve into a working lands program. The CRP was created in 1985 as a cropland retirement program.

Across Europe, butterfly populations are undergoing huge declines, with grassland butterfly abundance dropping by 39 percent between 1990 and 2017. Spain's Catalonia region offers an extreme example of this continent-wide wave of biodiversity loss: Over the past 25 years, populations of the most common grassland species have declined here by 71 percent, reports FERN's latest story, produced with National Geographic. (No paywall)

High prices for corn and soybeans, coupled with the ethanol mandate and generous crop insurance, are spurring farmers in the Great Plains to plow up native grasslands in favor of commodity crops. The loss of these ancient carbon sinks "poses a conundrum for the Biden administration," which wants to cut agriculture's carbon emissions to net zero and conserve 30 percent of the nation's land in a bid to protect biodiversity.(No paywall)

After slowing with the collapse of the commodity boom nearly a decade ago, the conversion of grassland to row crops is accelerating in the Great Plains of the United States and Canada, said the World Wildlife Fund.

The USDA said it accepted offers from landowners to enroll 2.5 million acres under the Grassland option of the Conservation Reserve, double the amount accepted last year. Nearly 45 percent of the new land will enter in two priority zones set by USDA, the Greater Yellowstone Elk Migratory Corridor in the West and the Historical Dust Bowl Region, still at risk of wind erosion, in the central and southern Plains.

In eastern Oregon, an experiment is underway to determine whether conservationists and ranchers, two groups often at odds, can work together to stave off development, support ranch economies and preserve biodiversity on the Zumwalt Prairie, America's largest remaining native bunchgrass prairie.(No paywall)